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OPERA SOFTWARE INFO Headquarters: Oslo, Norway Founded: August 1995 Employees: ~200 Funding: $32 million from angels, Four Seasons Ventures and Teknoinvest Key metric: US partners include Motorola, Qualcomm, Google, Adobe, Macromedia, IBM and Montevista URL: www.opera.com pany began to develop for other platforms, including the Symbian OS for mobile devices. The company now has browsers for all major desktop operating systems, with millions of deployments worldwide. Unlike mobile browsers from other vendors, Opera’s isn’t a scaled-down version of a fat, resource-intensive PC version; it is the only browser vendor to offer the same browser – and therefore to display the same Web pages – on PCs as well as other devices. “When you tell people that you offer the mobile Internet, that’s what they expect,” says von Tetzchner. “Since 1998 we have made sure [the browser] runs on a device with ridiculously low memory.” In other words, the mobile browser doesn’t require WAP (wireless access protocol) or NTT DoCoMo’s i-Mode, obviating the need for publishers to create mobiledevice versions of their content in WAP’s wireless markup language or i-Mode’s compact wireless markup language. “Making a WAP browser is fairly easy, so lots of providers do that,” he continues. “We do a Web browser. That’s a much bigger task.” The company has spent nearly a million hours developing a patented display method, called small-screen rendering, which uses clues from the HTML code of a Web page to reformat it to fit the width of any size of screen. For instance, it could re-render a page with a three-column layout into one. It also resizes images intelligently. The company sells its mobile browser to OS vendors such as Symbian, OEM phone vendors such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, and operators such as KDDI (the second-biggest operator in Japan, behind NTT), Vodafone and Orange. It even sells to endusers. The company earns about one-third of its revenue from its desktop product, sold direct to consumers or offered for free with embedded ads. The other two-thirds of revenues come from creators of embedded browser applications, mostly on mobile devices but also for verticals and home-media devices, a sector in which von Tetzchner expects huge growth in the next few years. The company is the process of rolling out the Opera Platform, which will give mobile devices access to what von Tetzchner calls “Internet on steroids.” The platform has hooks into the OS that allow the customer – the OEM, the operator or the OS provider – to “take over” the main screen. That would allow an end-user to get a variety of custom content from a mobile operator instead of a default display upon 74 RELEASE 1.0 WWW.RELEASE1-0.COM
turning on his phone. “The opening screen becomes programmable. It becomes a Web page,” explains von Tetzchner. “So you can have what you usually have [batterylife and signal-strength indicators and so on], but also other elements such as direct news feeds. That’s good for operators, because they can reach you as a customer. And it’s good for the customer, because you can get something that’s of interest to you.” The Opera platform isn’t replacing the OS, he stresses, but adding to it and giving the mobile phone more capabilities. In 2003, six new devices shipped with Opera pre-installed, according to von Tetzchner. In 2004 that number was 13. The company already has agreements that match the 2004 figure for 2005. . .with three quarters to go. Among other partnerships in the US market, Motorola uses the Opera browser for a number of phones and Adobe integrates the Opera browser into its Web development tool kits. The company also collaborates with IBM on voice technology. Rearden Commerce: Chore-chain management “We live in a tech-centric world where hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent [on application development] in discrete product areas,” begins Rearden Commerce founder and CEO Patrick Grady. “But none of it interoperates, and efforts at system integration have not helped much. In fact, we’ve reached a state of diminishing returns. It takes more effort to make applications interoperate than to do it manually.” Grady hopes to solve this problem with Rearden Commerce, neé Talaris, a company he founded in 2000 but which has been in stealth mode until now. The goal is to provide an e-commerce platform and service grid based on Web-services and service-oriented architecture (SOA) (SEE RELEASE 1.0, DECEMBER 2003) for what he describes as “user-centric computing: an environment in which all your disparate applications, services, devices and content streams interoperate as one meta app and work asynchronously on your behalf.” The concept is not a new one, the company readily concedes: “Others have tried [to do the same], most publicly Microsoft’s .Net/Passport/Hailstorm initiatives and HP’s eSpeak,” he continues. “Both failed, for a number of technical and business model reasons.” Just as Trumba (PAGE 79) is utilizing new technologies to implement an old idea (flexible, dynamic calendaring) better, so does Rearden hope to use both MARCH 2005 RELEASE 1.0 75
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ESTHER DYSON’S MONTHLY REPORT Rel
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SUNDAY, MARCH 20 PRESENTATIONS - Th
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Meanwhile, with his title of Chief
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CEO-designate of Lenovo, faces the
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ventures, marketing, software devel
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division that will be mostly the fo
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for Searching and Seizing Computers
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But that’s within Symantec. On a
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Page 39 and 40: INTERVIEW - Ann Livermore, Hewlett-
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Page 47 and 48: users’ clickstreams. “People do
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Page 51 and 52: The whole thing requires substantia
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Page 55 and 56: AFTERNOON SESSIONS THE GALLERY BY C
Page 57 and 58: Persuadio: Finding plankton in an o
Page 59 and 60: Company Presenters BY CHRISTINA KOU
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Page 67 and 68: Fiedotin and Tangney tested it with
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Page 71 and 72: Impinj’s technology, called self-
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Page 79 and 80: Adding the hierarchical information
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Page 85 and 86: Calendar of High-Tech Events APRIL
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